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Spammers, And The New Comment Moderation System

The new Blogger commenting system has been in place in many of our blogs for just over two weeks.

Some blog owners, who moderate using the new system, have started to notice a marked decrease in spam, hitting our Published, and Awaiting Moderation, queues, as the filters are trained. Other bloggers, who do not moderate, are observing the opposite.
Since the new commenting system was started, my blog is getting twice as much spam as before.

Oddly enough, both results were predictable.

As we identify spam comments, found both in our Awaiting Moderation and Published queues, we are helping to train the collaborative spam filters for everybody.

This causes the first result, the decrease in spam. However, the spammers will not go away without a fight. Nobody wants to return to their day job
Can I super-size your order?
once they have found the (current) path to easy riches as an Internet affiliate marketing consultant. So what to do?

Some spammers, seeing their income cut by the new system, will work harder.

The solution for some spammers is to work harder. Since not every blogger has elected to moderate comments, not every blog is using the new comment moderation system.

Those blogs remaining, which are not moderated, are easy targets for the spammers. Just turn up the heat, and double the amount of spam to the blogs that are not moderated.

Many spammers will increase output, indiscriminately.

Other spammers, not caring that they are being ignored by bloggers using the new system, will simply increase total traffic, everywhere. Besides attempting to post more spam to our blogs, spammers will spend time causing confusion in online forums.

What you see, from the increased spammer effort, will vary.

If you do not moderate comments, you should expect that the spammers, seeing that your blog is a productive target, will double (maybe, quadruple) their attention to your blog. They have to make up their losses, somewhere.

Conversely, if you do moderate, and as the filters are trained, you're not going to care that the amount of spam in your Spam folder has quadrupled. Out of sight, out of mind.

If you're like me, and you do surf the Spam folders when you're bored, you may even find comfort when looking there. Every new piece of spam, in the Spam folder today, represents the effort that you and others made, yesterday.

Moderate, or else.

Comments

I don't think I'll have that problem seeing as NO ONE checks my blog.
WNY Softball said…
Ever since they instituted this I have been bombarded with spam.

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